The problem is that "you" is not a person, "you" is every person who will ever work on the code in the future. And "innovation" isn't "the code you are writing now", "innovation" is "the code you are writing now, and next year, and the third-party library you want to integrate in 6 months, and the unit tests you don't have time for now but will become critical in 2-3 years as you become unable to ship working software, and the bug you'll spend a month working on because nobody has ever encountered it before."
Yes, you can look at this in terms of ROI. The author's point is that engineers - particularly ones who have never scaled & maintained a system over years and millions of users - consistently underweight the problems that they've never encountered before. With boring tech, other people have encountered them, and solved them, and you can Google for the answer or pull in a library. With bleeding-edge stuff, when you run into one of these, you have to drop everything you're doing and fix it, because nobody else will.
Yes, you can look at this in terms of ROI. The author's point is that engineers - particularly ones who have never scaled & maintained a system over years and millions of users - consistently underweight the problems that they've never encountered before. With boring tech, other people have encountered them, and solved them, and you can Google for the answer or pull in a library. With bleeding-edge stuff, when you run into one of these, you have to drop everything you're doing and fix it, because nobody else will.